Illustration: Juggling Act © 2020 created by Niki McQueen Balance in Balancing Our Bodies and Our Selves and Juggling or coordinating Our Selves and Our Bodies are closely linked. Life is a Tightrope Walk and Paul Klee's Tightrope Walker, emphatically concerned with his balance, features in Balancing. Once spotted Niki McQueen's extraordinary Juggling Act had to open this … [Read more...] about Juggling Our Selves and Our Bodies
Benzodiazepines
Ondine’s Curse: Can’t Live With or Without
Ondine's Curse links closely to Balancing our Bodies and next week's Juggling our Selves. Ondine’s Curse sounds like a Greek Myths. Its not. The story began taking shape a few hundred years ago and has been elaborated ever since - ending up featuring in The Little Mermaid and other stories. The standard version is that a faithless man is cursed by Ondine, a water-nymph, … [Read more...] about Ondine’s Curse: Can’t Live With or Without
Deprescribing – Where does Responsibility Lie?
This post follows on from last weeks Potentially Inappropriate Deprescribing and has links to this weeks The Creation Narrative and God Complex. It brings up a painfully tricky point. Reducing Medication Burdens is perhaps the most important task in medicine today. Many well-meaning folk are aware of and raising the profile of this need and attempting to work out how to go … [Read more...] about Deprescribing – Where does Responsibility Lie?
Potentially Inappropriate Deprescribing – PID
This post is linked to An Archipelago of Realities on DH.org. The link may not be clear when you start reading Archipelago but half way down it will be apparent. What is being said on Archipelago about SSRIs applies just as much to benzodiazepines here. Geriatric medicine came into being in the 1980s and with it a new word – polypharmacy – a phenomenon particularly … [Read more...] about Potentially Inappropriate Deprescribing – PID
Fertility and Desire
Recent posts on RxISK and davidhealy.org have covered Fertility and heralded the forthcoming birth of a Fertility Zone. On RxISK Uterine Roulette and Consent No Room at the Inn Medicine, Civilization and Cradles Sex, Fertility, France and Serotonin Timeline Disaster Sex Yes, No Sex Disaster On DH Has Healthcare Gone Mad Pharmageddon and … [Read more...] about Fertility and Desire
Medicine, Civilization and Cradles
Hush-a-bye baby on the tree-top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock; When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, Down will come baby, cradle, and all. We face a problem as important or more important than Climate Change - the changing climate in healthcare - see Pharmageddon and Our Healthcare Climate. For a decade, RxISK has been pointing to a polypharmacy pandemic, … [Read more...] about Medicine, Civilization and Cradles
Drugs & Sex & Fertility – and SSRIs
Our Love Life Needs You © Nina Otulakowski August 2022 This post calls on everyone, male or female, currently or previously taking any drug who thinks that a drug may have impacted on their fertility. Fertility should be of interest to anyone taking serotonin reuptake inhibiting drugs - SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, antihistamines, antibiotics, analgesics and related drugs - … [Read more...] about Drugs & Sex & Fertility – and SSRIs
How the Safety of Drugs was Destroyed
Emer Cooke, the CEO of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is Irish. This is Dublin's famous Halfpenny Bridge which for some reason features in an article outlining the history of the phrase Tail wags Dog which seems appropriate for what followed. I wrote to Emer recently about a bizarre letter I received from Kinapse - A Brush with EMA - who run EMA's medical literature … [Read more...] about How the Safety of Drugs was Destroyed
The Wild Doctor – Le Médecin Sauvage
The French playwright Moliere loved poking fun at pomposity especially when it involved doctors. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, he pokes fun at Monsieur Jourdain, a pompous upstart, who has come into money and is taking on airs and graces. Translating gentilhomme into gentleman misses what the word meant around 1660, which was more like civilized, the manners which … [Read more...] about The Wild Doctor – Le Médecin Sauvage
Could Journalists be Doctors in Disguise
I had to give some workshops a few years ago to media students and either while thinking about what to say or in the middle of saying it, or soon after, it hit me that good doctoring has a lot in common with good journalism. Both hinge on getting the story right and key to that is having a real person whom others can contact to check out the story they have been told about … [Read more...] about Could Journalists be Doctors in Disguise